Enterprise Architecture Practice and Organizational Agility: An Exploratory Study

As contemporary organizations experience an increasing pressure to change, organizational agility, i.e. the ability to sense and respond continuously to changes in the environment, is required. Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been proposed as an architectural and organizational approach in order to meet this challenge. In this exploratory study we discuss the usefulness of the approach, building on the contribution of Ross et al. [26]. Our research question is: to what degree can medium sized organizations use EA to build organizational agility? Our empirical evidence is a case study with four medium sized Norwegian organizations. We find that the adoption of EA principles is pragmatic, and that maturity levels are generally low. We do, however, find reasonable support for the assumption that EA is actually increasing organizational agility, in particular the capability to respond to external changes. We identify two paths from EA to organizational agility.